Oklahoma State Senator Faces Charges and Condemnation

Ralph Shortey, an Oklahoma state senator who was charged with three felonies, including engaging in child prostitution, turned himself in on Thursday.CreditCleveland County Sheriff's Office, via Associated Press

When Ralph Shortey arrived in the Oklahoma State Senate in 2011, he quickly made a name for himself as a leading Republican voice in a conservative state. He discovered the spotlight with legislation over the years that at times embraced the fringe.

But none of the attention Mr. Shortey received for his legislative efforts compares to what he is facing now. Acting on a tip, the police in an Oklahoma City suburb swarmed a Super 8 motel shortly after midnight March 9 and found Mr. Shortey and a 17-year-old boy together in Room 120, according to the authorities.

The teenager told officers he and the senator had met a year ago through a Craigslist ad and had exchanged sexually explicit texts over the messaging app Kik. He said they had been smoking marijuana before the police arrived, and officers reported finding condoms in a backpack belonging to Mr. Shortey.

After the accusations were made public this week, Mr. Shortey’s colleagues in the Legislature moved swiftly, passing a resolution on Wednesday condemning his alleged “disorderly behavior” and stripping him of nearly all his power and authority in the State Senate. He is allowed to keep his $38,000 salary, but the resolution allows the senators to expel him in the future. Numerous lawmakers, including Gov. Mary Fallin, have called on him to resign.

On Thursday, Mr. Shortey, 35, turned himself in to the authorities and was charged with three felonies, including engaging in child prostitution. He was released a short time later on a $100,000 bond.

He told reporters outside the jail after being charged that he would have a comment soon. But on Friday afternoon, he still had not commented, and he did not respond to email messages or telephone calls to multiple numbers associated with him. An operator at the state legislature building said no one was in his office, and it could not be determined whether he had a defense lawyer.

It has been a staggering rise and fall for Mr. Shortey, who was 28, unemployed and living on his wife’s savings when he first ran for office in 2010, winning as an underdog. Representing an urban area in southern Oklahoma City, he depended on volunteers from his Baptist church for campaign help and made the centerpiece of his platform a promise to protect families.

He vowed to crack down on illegal immigration, calling undocumented workers a threat to families and comparing them to terrorists. He said he would fight to restrict abortion, saying his advocacy was cemented after his family’s second child, a girl, survived a breached birth.

“We need a leader who, as a parent, truly understands the urgency and priority of caring for God’s little ones,” he wrote on his campaign website.

In the past six years in the Legislature, he became a dependable champion of conservative causes. Randy Rose, a retired Oklahoma City firefighter who ran as a Democrat against Mr. Shortey in 2010, said he became friends with him after the election and they met every so often, including three weeks ago, to discuss how to help firefighters.

“He was kind of a like a big giant teddy bear,” Mr. Rose said in an interview. “He was a young guy and inexperienced, but I think he was trying.”

A year ago, Troy Stevenson, the executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, a gay, lesbian and transgender advocacy group in the state, said he was searching for a state senator to help stop proposed legislation that would have required schools to provide separate bathrooms for students who objected on religious grounds from sharing restrooms with transgender students.

The night before it was to come before a Senate committee, Mr. Stevenson said he approached Mr. Shortey and urged him to vote against it. He said Mr. Shortey told him that he could not openly defy his Republican colleagues but promised to leave the room during the vote so the bill would have less chance of passing.

“He showed up in the chamber and voted for the bill,” Mr. Stevenson said. “It was pure hypocrisy.”